arXiv subjects

Ri-Hua Zheng

Publications and source records attributed to Ri-Hua Zheng.

13 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Selective Quantum Mpemba Dynamics in Chaotic Spin Chains

In a symmetry-restoration quantum Mpemba effect, an initial state with stronger local symmetry breaking can lose that memory faster than a state that starts closer to the symmetric manifold. We study how this local ordering reversal depends on the spatial profile of a longitudinal field in a clean U(1)-conserving spin chain, comparing spectral level statistics with crossings of the entanglement asymmetry for the same Hamiltonians. We find that Gaussian orthogonal ensemble (GOE)-like level statistics alone do not determine whether Mpemba crossings occur. Across field textures, GOE-like spectra can occur with or without entanglement-asymmetry crossings at the same field strength. In a near-staggered detuned field, the total charge-sector coherence reverses its ordering while the entanglement asymmetry retains its initial order. This contrast links the crossing response to the distribution of local charge-sector coherence and its entropic weighting in the reduced density matrix.

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arXiv2025

Critical quantum metrology robust against dissipation and non-adiabaticity

Critical systems near quantum phase transitions were predicted to be useful for improvement of metrological precision, thanks to their ultra-sensitive response to a tiny variation of the control Hamiltonian. Despite the promising perspective, realization of criticality-enhanced quantum metrology is an experimentally challenging task, mainly owing to the extremely long time needed to encode the signal to some physical quantity of a critical system. We here circumvent this problem by making use of the critical behaviors in the Jaynes-Cummings model, comprising a single qubit and a photonic resonator, to which the signal field is coupled. The information about the field amplitude is encoded in the qubit's excitation number in the dark state, which displays a divergent changing rate at the critical point. The most remarkable feature of this critical sensor is that the performance is insensitive to the leakage to bright eigenstates, caused by decoherence and non-adiabatic effects. We demonstrate such a metrological protocol in a superconducting circuit, where an Xmon qubit, interacting with a resonator, is used as a probe for estimating the amplitude of a microwave field coupled to the resonator. The measured quantum Fisher information exhibits a critical quantum enhancement, confirming the potential of this system for quantum metrology.

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arXiv2025

Emergence of irreversible decoherence from unitary dynamics

The decoherence of superpositions of classically distinguishable states (cat states) is crucial for understanding quantum-to-classical transitions and quantum measurements. So far, decoherence processes of mesoscopic cat states have been demonstrated in several experiments. However, the issue of how the unitary system-reservoir dynamics can lead to irreversible system decoherence remains largely unexplored in experiments. Here we experimentally explore this fundamental issue with a circuit quantum electrodynamics device, where a bus microwave resonator storing a photonic cat state is connected to many nonlinear electronic oscillators. Each of these oscillators that are effectively coupled to the bus resonator serves as one degree of freedom of the reservoir. By gradually increasing the number of the reservoir's degrees of freedom, we find that the revivable quantum coherence progressively decays, owing to the growth in the amount of inerasable information about the system's state encoded in the reservoir. Our results illustrate that irreversible decoherence of a quantum system is an emergent phenomenon, arising from the unitary dynamics involving the system and many of the reservoir's degrees of freedom, which is crucial for the reconciliation of quantum mechanics and classical physics.

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arXiv2025

Observation of photonic dynamics in dissipative quantum Rabi models

The quantum Rabi model (QRM), composed of a qubit interacting with a quantized photonic field, is a cornerstone of quantum optics. The QRM with dominant unitary dynamics has been demonstrated in circuit quantum electrodynamics (QED) systems, but an open QRM with a strong photonic dissipation has not been experimentally explored. We here present the first experimental demonstration of such an open system in circuit QED, featuring a controlled competition between the coherent qubit-field interaction and the photonic dissipation. We map out the photon number distributions of the dissipative resonator for different coupling strengths in the steady state. We further observe the variation of the photon number during the system's evolution toward the steady state with fixed control parameters. The results demonstrate that the system's behavior is significantly modified by photonic dissipation.

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arXiv2025

Experimental demonstration of spontaneous symmetry breaking with emergent multi-qubit entanglement

Spontaneous symmetry breaking (SSB) is crucial to the occurrence of phase transitions. Once a phase transition occurs, a quantum system presents degenerate eigenstates that lack the symmetry of the Hamiltonian. After crossing the critical point, the system is essentially evolved to a quantum superposition of these eigenstates until decoherence sets in. Despite the fundamental importance and potential applications in quantum technologies, such quantum-mechanical SSB phenomena have not been experimentally explored in many-body systems. We here present an experimental demonstration of the SSB process in the Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick model, governed by the competition between the individual driving and intra-qubit interaction. The model is realized in a circuit quantum electrodynamics system, where 6 Xmon qubits are coupled in an all-to-all manner through virtual photon exchange mediated by a resonator. The observed nonclassical correlations among these qubits in the symmetry-breaking region go beyond the conventional description of SSB, shedding new light on phase transitions for quantum many-body systems.

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arXiv2024

Measuring topological invariants for higher-order exceptional points in quantum three-mode systems

Owing to the presence of exceptional points (EPs), non-Hermitian (NH) systems can display intriguing topological phenomena without Hermitian analogs. However, experimental characterizations of exceptional topological invariants have been restricted to second-order EPs (EP2s) in classical or semiclassical systems. We here propose an NH multi-mode system with higher-order EPs, each of which is underlain by a multifold-degenerate multipartite entangled eigenstate. We implement the NH model by controllably coupling a Josephson-junction-based electronic mode to two microwave resonators. We experimentally quantify the topological invariant for an EP3, by mapping out the complex eigenspectra of the tripartite system along a loop surrounding this EP3 in the parameter space. The nonclassicality of the realized topology is manifested by the observed quantum correlations in the corresponding eigenstates. Our results extend research of exceptional topology to fully quantum-mechanical models with multipartite entangled eigenstates.

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arXiv2024

Experimental observation of spontaneous symmetry breaking in a quantum phase transition

Spontaneous symmetry breaking (SSB) plays a central role in understanding a large variety of phenomena associated with phase transitions, such as superfluid and superconductivity. So far, the transition from a symmetric vacuum to a macroscopically ordered phase has been substantially explored. The process bridging these two distinct phases is critical to understanding how a classical world emerges from a quantum phase transition, but so far remains unexplored in experiment. We here report an experimental demonstration of such a process with a quantum Rabi model engineered with a superconducting circuit. We move the system from the normal phase to the superradiant phase featuring two symmetry-breaking field components, one of which is observed to emerge as the classical reality. The results demonstrate that the environment-induced decoherence plays a critical role in the SSB.

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arXiv2023

Revealing inherent quantum interference and entanglement of a Dirac particle

Although originally predicted in relativistic quantum mechanics, Zitterbewegung can also appear in some classical systems, which leads to the important question of whether Zitterbewegung of Dirac particles is underlain by a more fundamental and universal interference behavior without classical analogs. We here reveal such an interference pattern in phase space, which underlies but goes beyond Zitterbewegung, and whose nonclassicality is manifested by the negativity of the phase space quasiprobability distribution, and the associated pseudospin-momentum entanglement. We confirm this discovery by numerical simulation and an on-chip experiment, where a superconducting qubit and a quantized microwave field respectively emulate the internal and external degrees of freedom of a Dirac particle. The measured quasiprobability negativities agree well with the numerical simulation. Besides being of fundamental importance, the demonstrated nonclassical effects are useful in quantum technology.

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arXiv2023

Thermal-dephasing-tolerant generation of Schrödinger cat states with Rydberg dressed blockade

Multipartite entangled states involving non-locality are one of the most fascinating characteristics of quantum mechanics. In this work, we propose a thermal-dephasing-tolerant generation of mesoscopic entangled states with Rydberg dressed atoms. We encode logical state on dressed states rather than Rydberg states. Such treatment can increase the lifetime of multipartite entanglement coherence to around 3 times compared to the Rydberg-state-coding one at the same system size, and therefore induce solid fidelities of mesoscopic superposition states generation. The current work theoretically verifies the advantages of using Rydberg dressed states in many-body quantum entanglement, which is helpful for large-scale quantum computation and many-body Rydberg quantum simulation.

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arXiv2023

Observation of a superradiant phase transition with emergent cat states

Superradiant phase transitions (SPTs) are important for understanding light-matter interactions at the quantum level, and play a central role in criticality-enhanced quantum sensing. So far, SPTs have been observed in driven-dissipative systems, but the emergent light fields did not show any nonclassical characteristic due to the presence of strong dissipation. Here we report an experimental demonstration of the SPT featuring the emergence of a highly nonclassical photonic field, realized with a resonator coupled to a superconducting qubit, implementing the quantum Rabi model. We fully characterize the light-matter state by Wigner matrix tomography. The measured matrix elements exhibit quantum interference intrinsic of a photonic mesoscopic superposition, and reveal light-matter entanglement

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arXiv2023

Entanglement-interference complementarity and experimental demonstration in a superconducting circuit

Quantum entanglement between an interfering particle and a detector for acquiring the which-path information plays a central role for enforcing Bohr's complementarity principle. However, the quantitative relation between this entanglement and the fringe visibility remains untouched upon for an initial mixed state. Here we find an equality for quantifying this relation. Our equality characterizes how well the interference pattern can be preserved when an interfering particle, initially carrying a definite amount of coherence, is entangled, to a certain degree, with a which-path detector. This equality provides a connection between entanglement and interference in the unified framework of coherence, revealing the quantitative entanglement-interference complementarity. We experimentally demonstrate this relation with a superconducting circuit, where a resonator serves as a which-path detector for an interfering qubit. The measured fringe visibility of the qubit's Ramsey signal and the qubit-resonator entanglement exhibit a complementary relation, in well agreement with the theoretical prediction.

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arXiv2021

Demonstration of dynamical control of three-level open systems with a superconducting qutrit

We propose a method for the dynamical control in three-level open systems and realize it in the experiment with a superconducting qutrit. Our work demonstrates that in the Markovian environment for a relatively long time (3 us), the systemic populations or coherence can still strictly follow the preset evolution paths. This is the first experiment for precisely controlling the Markovian dynamics of three-level open systems, providing a solid foundation for the future realization of dynamical control in multiple open systems. An instant application of the techniques demonstrated in this experiment is to stabilize the energy of quantum batteries.

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arXiv2021

Optimized nonadiabatic holonomic quantum computation based on Förster resonance in Rydberg atoms

In this paper, we propose a scheme for implementing the nonadiabatic holonomic quantum computation (NHQC+) of two Rydberg atoms by using invariant-based reverse engineering (IBRE). The scheme is based on Förster resonance induced by strong dipole-dipole interaction between two Rydberg atoms, which provides a selective coupling mechanism to simply the dynamics of system. Moreover, for improving the fidelity of the scheme, the optimal control method is introduced to enhance the gate robustness against systematic errors. Numerical simulations show the scheme is robust against the random noise in control fields, the deviation of dipole-dipole interaction, the Förster defect, and the spontaneous emission of atoms. Therefore, the scheme may provide some useful perspectives for the realization of quantum computation with Rydberg atoms.

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